Why "Should everybody go to college?" is the wrong question

Whether asked directly or implicitly, the question "Should everybody go to college?" plays a big part in current discussions about education in America.  It is lurking behind talk about access to higher education, views about it drive responses to MOOCs, it is implicit in doubts about the value of higher education, it shapes the little indignities of life in high school (as when the already poorly named SEOP--student education opportunity plan--takes on the name CCE--college and career ready--so that legislators and administrators can signal their unwillingness to take a stand on the question.)

That said, "Should everybody go to college?" is the wrong question, both because it doesn't help us think clearly about education and because it pushes to the side exactly the people who are meant to be served by that discussion--parents and students.  Here is why it is a bad question:

1. Only people on the margins can give a clear answer to it--"yes" or "no".  But even worse, everyone else has to temporize--yes in this instance, but no in that.  Such temporizing immediately turns an important conversation into an argument about definitions and categories.
2. As soon as it becomes a discussion about categories, it is actual students who disappear.  In their place are groups of students, who should follow one path or another based on the position of the person answering the question.
3. The question answerers (or at least the main voices in the debate) tend to be people who have administrative or financial, but rarely personal interest in the answer.  That is, they tend to be people with official roles in the education system facing off against people who want to change the educational system.
4. On the other hand, the question leaves the views and voices of families and students at the margin.  They don't have the financial or organizational presence to weigh in on such a big question.  Instead, they fit into a box--"You took college prep courses and got good grades and can afford college?  Well, then college is for you--move ahead."  Or, put another way, the question turns people who should actively be shaping decisions into acceptors of decisions/categories made in advance for abstract versions of them.

Is there a better question to use in its place?  I prefer, "How important is college?"  Here is why:

1. It is a question that places students and their families at the center of the discussion, because it can be answered from personal experience and belief in specific ways.
2. It is a question that is as meaningfully asked of college-goers as of non-college-goers.  After all, lots of  students in college place the importance of college below other things--family, jobs, skiing.  And lots of people who aren't in college place college high in their list of priorities.
3. It is a question that requires families and students to think about school/work/life balance.  In other words, it places college into the real lives of students rather than making college-going an activity separate from the rest of life. 
4. It is a question, the answer to which can lead to real action.  Regardless of your view on "should everybody go to college?" almost no one can do anything to move opinion one way or another.  But the question "How important is college?" has immediate and actionable (sorry, I hate that word) consequences.
5. The question moves power away from central authorities towards the level--personal, family, and community--that is most immediately effected by the decision.
6. It is a question that places educational policy and innovation--be it MOOCs, or the creation of new institutions, or financial aid, or scholarships, or admission requirements--in the service of actual human beings, instead of the other way around.  If your big thing is MOOCs, then your answer to "Should everybody go to college?" serves MOOCs.  But if your big question is "How important is college?" then you have lots of tools at your disposal to shape the answer to the actual needs and desires of actual people.   MOOCs for some, community college for others, liberal arts colleges for yet others.

Considering Martin Luther King and George Orwell together

It has been 30 years since Ronald Reagan signed the legislation designating today and each third Monday of  January Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Today is the anniversary of George Orwell's 1950 death, marked this year by the first-ever George Orwell Day.

Orwell and King are rarely considered together. Their careers as writers and activists barely overlapped; I know of no instance where King referenced Orwell's writing.  Orwell's great concern was totalitarianism, King's was racial discrimination.  Even their commemoration days point in different directions, King's (at the request of his family, friends, and political allies) indicating his birth, Orwell's (at the wishes of his estate and publisher) marking his death.

But in three areas their work overlapped.  First, both Orwell and King identified imperialism as a pursuit that corrupted the globe and the nation.  Orwell's term as an imperial policeman in Burma right out of college made him a representative of the British crown and enforcer of British law on the ground. Those years marked his thinking about law and justice, which might seem good in the abstract or the homeland, but which  came up wanting when applied in strange places and real settings.

 King's attention to imperialism came at the end of his life, not the beginning.  But like Orwell, King's recognition of the gap between the abstract good of domestic law, and the injustice of its application overseas, led him to argue that the injustices of a nation's extra-territorial actions corrupts domestic law as well.

Second, both Orwell and King doubted the ability of the state to police itself.  Orwell's attention focused on the nation-state as the location of injustice.  King's attention focused more intently on state and local government.  But both saw that in the 20th century the state both threatened and protected people.  The challenge was to determine how to limit the threat by expanding the areas in which people could speak and act freely.

Here is the third overlap between Orwell and King.  Though today the guardians of King's memory focus on his leadership of marches and his influence on legislation, and most Americans know Orwell from his fiction, both Orwell and King saw plain non-fiction speech as the indispensable tool of freedom.

Today I re-read Orwell's greatest essay, "Politics and the English Language" (1946) followed by King's greatest essay, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (1963). Read one after the other these works make a pair, "Letter" a real-world application of "Politics."  In "Politics", for example, Orwell argues that "the great enemy of clear language is insincerity."  King opens his letter with an attack on the insincerity of clergymen who called the protests in Birmingham "unwise and untimely"  thus blaming protesters for the unjust application of the law in Birmingham. Orwell calls for clear, direct, brief, unflowered language. King obliges: "I am in Birmingham because injustice is here." Or, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Or this: "Anyone who lives inside the United States cannot be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds."

 Orwell concludes his essay by arguing that "Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable."  King, after a tightly reasoned opening, lets loose with example after example of how the political use of one word, "wait", covers up generations of murder and lies:

" But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait."

American political rhetoric, the inaugural address notwithstanding, needs to heed Orwell's advice and King's examples.  Today's rhetoric, like that in 1946 and 1963 is detached from reality, so general as to be incomprehensible, so rigid as to be totalitarian.  Orwell and King knew that such rhetoric was evidence of a debased society.  But they also demonstrated that intent efforts to speak truth, describe reality, and be humble before the challenge of communicating were essential if humans were to live good lives.

Thinking about academic innovation in a context of declining demand for education

Over the past decade, colleges and universities have become adept at offering new or revised academic programs to respond to changes in the marketplace for students.  So, if the number of transfer students in your area is in decline, seek more freshmen.  If your MBA program is dropping off, then add a program in health sciences.  If demand for traditional undergraduate programs slackens, then add new pricing schemes or new modes of delivery.

This remains a smart approach to adjusting to the sort we have had over the last decade where demand for education continued to increase but was distributed differently than in the past.

Three recent studies suggest, though, that overall demand for higher education has flattened or is in decline. The Council of Graduate Schools reports that overall enrollment in graduate programs fell in 2011 for the second consecutive year.  NAICU, passing along federal data, notes that overall enrollment in undergraduate programs declined last year.  And WICHE's new study of high school graduation suggests that the number of students graduating high school will decline for the next couple of years before flattening out.

This is not to say that there will be no mid-level changes in demand.  To the contrary, WICHE is clear on changes in the ethnicity of new college-goers, and it seems likely that more students will continue to be willing to take online courses.  But whereas in the past realignments of student interest took place in a context of overall growth in enrollment, these changes will take place in a period of flat or declining enrollment.

What does this shift mean?  A couple of thoughts:

• Campuses cannot count on a rising tide of enrollment to protect them from misguided guesses about where new demand would lie, as they could in past years.
• Because there is not a naturally increasing enrollment, new programs or approaches will need to pay for themselves almost immediately, or be replaced.
• Without a safety net, campuses (especially small ones) will need to get better at certain types of new programs or enrollment initiatives.  That is, they will need to become specialists in innovation rather than generalists.
• Schools will need to get better at thinking about geography, academic preparation, and diversity as the  variables in their academic innovations, rather than putting new academic programs at the foreground and worrying about the make-up of the students interested in them later.
• It will be harder for institutions to start or sustain loss-leader programs, that is, programs that do not bring in revenue but which garner some attention for the institution.  (In this context, one has to wonder how long even large universities will be able to maintain their MOOCs without meaningful enrollment, student success, and revenue associated with them.)

The best books I didn't finish in 2012, and what they say about how I ought to live

It has been six weeks since I posted to this blog.  I didn't intend to stop writing; this wasn't some sort of purposeful holiday pause.  I just found myself without anything much to say.

This is a sign in part of my feeling stymied and overwhelmed by work, which is the topic of much of my writing.  Enrollment management is a wonderful but tough business, especially in a time where demographics and economics and culture are all pointing to challenging times for small private institutions of higher education.  I'm confident that I haven't had an interesting thing to say about enrollment management for the past 6 weeks.

I'm wrangling Westminster's strategic planning process as the chair of the strategic planning steering committee.  We are in an early phase--drafting a vision narrative, kicking off a SWOT analysis, seeking feedback.  And because we are in an early phase we are in a time where silence makes more sense than essays do.

So in a holiday season (with lots of flu at our house), rather than write, I've been reading.  There are two types of readers--people who finish books and people who start them.  I start lots of books--many more than I finish.  Here is a list of stuff that I read but didn't finish in 2012; clustered by genre or topic, and then a few self-criticisms in closing.

Poetry
There are poets whose language is simply put but whose poems give me a feeling of being in the presence of something powerful and unspeakable.  In this, they are something like worship.  This year I've been reading three: Zbigniew Herbert, Mary Oliver, and Kay Ryan.

Religion
There is a type of book about religion that is at the confluence of community, ethics, and theology.  Some of the writing that sits in this location is liturgical, some of it is made up of essays, and some is personal narrative with religious overtones.  I'm currently reading these books: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Wisdom of Stability, Stanley Hauerwas, War and the American Difference, Shane Claiborne (and Wilson-Hartgrove), Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, Eric Elnes, The Phoenix Affirmations.

Civic Life
I'm working my way through these books about civic life.  (By civic life I mean that these are books about the civitas.  They touch frequently on politics, but it is not politics but the quality of public life in a particular place that is at the heart of their concerns.) Mary Parker Follet, The New State: Group Organization, The Solution of Popular Government, Robert Coles, Lives of Moral Leadership, James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play, and Roger Scruton, How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism.


What does this list mean?  Clearly there are gaps between what is in my head and what is in my life. My intellectual interests are in local, small-scale responses to issues, especially those that draw on and build local associations, be they civic, cultural, or religious.  And just as clearly, if you looked at my life you probably wouldn't notice that fact.  I commute 70 miles round trip each day to work. I feel estranged from my own religious congregation (and perhaps religion) but can't find a new one.  My neighbors and co-workers think I'm on the political left; but if American conservatism had any Burke left in it I would be a conservative, or if there was a green libertarianism, that is where I would be.

What does your list of unfinished books say about you?

The standardization of student recruiting

In the past week, my 16-year old daughter received letters from the University of Miami, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Denver, and Texas Christian.  There is nothing unusual about strong private universities trying to recruit an academically promising high school junior. But the arrival of these letters, and their contents, say a lot about the standardization of student recruiting.

Here is what I mean.  My daughter hadn't received mail from any schools in about a month.  Then, in one week, a flurry of letters.  This can only mean that the schools sending letters are all using the same vendor to manage their name buys and the early search phase of recruiting.  That fact is borne out by the fact that the letters all look the same--they all tell my daughter how promising she is, and they all offer her a special publication (hints on how to have a successful campus visit in one; suggestions on choosing a college in the others).  All ask her to log-in to access the information, and provide her a special log-in and password to do so.  Three ask her to complete a "quiz' to determine her top major choices.  Even the layout of the letter and the envelope look the same.

The gaps in the letters are as interesting as their contents.  They contain very little about the institutions, their missions, or their distinctive programs, and this in spite of the fact that these schools are actually distinctive.  RPI is a great technology school, Miami is in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, the University of Denver offers great programs in business and diplomacy, and Texas Christian is, well, Christian.  But unless you were a very well-informed high school junior, you would never know that from the letters.

What does it mean when significantly different institutions recruit students in ways that blur the differences between them?  It means first of all that student recruiting, as with many other parts of enrollment management, is becoming standardized, with the assumptions behind standardization being driven by vendors. Among those assumptions is that the first step in recruiting prospective students is to entice them with praise, promise them access to special information, and get them to provide information for the school's recruiting database, which in turn makes it possible for the institution to launch a concentrated marketing campaign at the student.

One has to wonder whether this approach is good either for students or for institutions. Is it likely to connect students early with schools where the students are likely to flourish?  Does it provide important decision-making information early enough in the process?  Does it create authentic relationships between students and potential schools?  And for institutions, does it make sense to put distinctive missions, programs, locations, and other institutional characteristics in the background?

 I would guess that the answer to most of these questions is "no."  Which raises another question--if these practices don't make sense for students or colleges and universities, how long will we, as enrollment managers keep them up?  Probably as long as vendors encourage them and we, out of anxiety about our ability to enroll enough of the "right' students, agree to do so.

Five ways small colleges can respond to MOOCs

The chorus of people proclaiming that MOOCs will destroy traditional higher education is long and getting louder.  MSN Money wonders if they portend "The End of Higher Education as We Know It." The excellent education analyst Kevin Carey suggests that they present both a solution to access and cost challenges of higher education.  And venture capitalists, world-renowned universities, and star faculty members are lending their wealth, fame, and wisdom to the creation of businesses that create, market, and manage MOOCs.

If MOOCs achieve their wildest dreams--huge enrollments of students taking courses for free that grant college credit, then  institutions that charge large tuitions will be hurt.  But MOOCs are far from those dreams.  While a few courses have massive enrollments, a tiny proportion of students complete them.  The quality of the course content is uncertain, and the pedagogical assumptions behind them are flawed, at least if what we think we know about the power of active learning is true. MOOCs offer individual courses, not well thought-through curricula that lead to higher-level learning outcomes. And MOOCs don't have a business model that works for the simple reason that free things don't earn the money required to create them.  In this, MOOCs are not unlike shareware and social networks--both things that consumers can use for free but which seek to earn income.

It is here--at the intersection of MOOCs' prominence and their weakness, that small colleges who wish to engage with MOOCs (as opposed to ignoring them or demeaning their popularity) can act.  So the question is how small colleges can respond to MOOCs in a way that takes advantage of their prominence and the expertise of small colleges.  Here are a few thoughts:

• Provide academic support to students who enroll in MOOCs. Any traditional institution that lost more than 90 percent of the students in a class before it ended would shut down.  And so small colleges have figured out how to ensure that students stay enrolled, not just for a single course but through to graduation.  They do so by providing academic support--discussions, tutoring, advising, and evaluation to track student learning.  MOOC students who are serious about learning would be anxious to have this sort of support.
• Provide feedback, evaluation, and improvements for MOOCs. One of the dangers of using famous faculty to teach MOOCs is that famous faculty get their fame from excellence in research, not (usually) in provoking student learning.  MOOC providers (and other edtech entrepreneurs) have not tended to study student learning or to design their work based on measurable outcomes. In other words, online providers of education haven't given attention to quality control.  Colleges and universities have spent the better part of the past twenty years building courses to achieve certain educational outcomes.  That expertise is sorely needed in the world of MOOCs.
• Use MOOCs to fill gaps in their own curricula. Students at small colleges experience curricular gaps in three ways: the school does not offer a particular course because it lack faculty expertise in that area, courses are offered rarely so students who need to take a course can't get it, or students develop curiosity in an area where there is no course.  MOOCs could fill those gaps more easily and less expensively than hiring an adjunct, assigning overload to a faculty member, or hiring a new faculty line.  So if a student wants a course in, say, East African history, let her take a MOOC. more broadly, MOOCs could be a way to round out the curriculum for intensely focused schools.  If you run a music conservatory, for example, use MOOCs to fill out general education.
• Use MOOCs for remediation. A large proportion of college students need remediation which institutions supply by offering lots of sections of college algebra, for example.  The quality of these courses vary among instructors (often adjuncts), and the cost to the institution (faculty lines, classroom space, etc.) and to students (uncertain quality, the need to repeat, slowing the path to graduation) make remediation a big issue.  But if an institution selected a MOOC in, say, remedial English (or built a curriculum in math through the Khan Academy's YouTube lessons) consistency of content would improve, students could progress at their own speed, and the cost to the institution would go down. 
• Use MOOCs to assure the quality of prior knowledge. Colleges already accept massive amounts of transfer credit.  The quality of some of it is very good.  But other sources--concurrent enrollment, for example--provide prior learning of uncertain quality.  Add to this fact that ever more students will come to traditional colleges with credit from for-profit universities, corporate training, and military service.  Many schools deny students credit for that experience.  but a school which wanted to welcome students who had learned in those settings might ask prospective students to work through a MOOC for free, and use their success in the MOOC as a  rationale for granting credit for prior learning.  MOOCs thus become a real tool for access to higher education, not a tool for avoiding the wisdom built into enrolling full-time in a college.

What I've learned by always voting for losers

With only two exceptions, I have voted in every election since I turned 18 in 1984.  And with equally rare exceptions (a couple of referenda and city council elections; Obama in 2008) I have voted for losing candidates every time.

You learn a lot when nearly every vote you cast is for the losing side.  Here are a few things I've picked up:

• If you are a localist or a communitarian, you have no chance of winning an election.  When I say this I mean simply that I think that local communities are the basis of a healthy civic life, and that decisions about civic issues should be made by the people who are most effected by them.  Philosophically, both major parties have threads that align with localism--Catholic social thought, particularly about subsidiarity, and Burkean conservatism on the right; the reflexive praise for grassroots activism, the New Left, the "buy local" movement on the left.  But to get to the level of elections, candidates and platforms have a tendency to push decisions up the political hierarchy, not down it.
• Voting is important, politics are important, elections  are not.  By this I mean simply that voting and politics are symbolically significant because they ask people with differing views to come to some sort of resolution about an issue.  Much of the rest of our lives do the same thing--we are always working to make decisions with others in our families, churches, schools, etc.  But elections often poison this natural  impulse, because they do not encourage joint decision-making, instead focusing on individual choice-making. Civic life, and major issues, are never about simple yes or no, this candidate or that choices.
• The most troubling part of elections is not campaign spending, or attack ads, or any of the things that point to division between partisans.  It is instead the shared commitment of leaders in both parties to proclaim that their candidates (particularly for higher office) have within them the ability to solve problems.  When Mitt Romney said he knew how to turn the economy around; when Barack Obama said he would already have done so were it not for the recalcitrance of the Republicans, they were both wrong.  Their statements were not lies as much as they were delusions.  One person, especially in a democratic system and a market economy, cannot "fix the  economy."  It is not amenable to control, whether in good times or in bad.  Individual decisions matter, it is true.  But their reach is small, and no amount of blaming or chest-thumping can change that.
• Fortunately, while elections are important for political parties, they are less important for the quality of community life. I live in an overwhelmingly Mormon, pro-Romney neighborhood.  I voted for Gary Johnson for president.  The day after the election, my position in my neighborhood was unchanged.  People who thought us strange before still think so; our kids still have their friends; I still wonder how to be a useful member of my community, I still long to feel a part of something, to contribute to the common good, to find a supportive place in the res publica. 

Voting again for losing candidates doesn't change that at all.